I'm a therapist in private practice in Lincoln and Reviving. Ophelia is my attempt to make sense of my experiences in the last 5 years. I've seen so many girls in The Last 5 Years in serious trouble girls who were hurting themselves cutting and burning themselves had Eating Disorders alcohol and drug problems severe depression were refusing to go to school running away from homes girls who were sexual assault victims or we're having a variety of problems related to their sexual behavior andThe statistic actually that got me interested in writing. This book was a statistic that 40% of all the girls in our County had considered suicide last year that statistic made me think that's a dysfunctional family. Siri was grossly inadequate to discuss the issues with children and I wanted to write a book that really looked at some issues in the kosher that I think make a Very Girl poisoning kosher the girls. I saw by the way are not necessarily insightful inarticulate at this age. They tend to be intense full of contradictions. I've seen girls with pink hair and septum Pierce's girls that were math students who were burning themselves vegetarians with drug problems. Sometimes they're very in comprehensible. For example, I had a girl in therapy with class president very beautiful.Very popular girl who was in therapy with her second suicide attempt. Another perplexing thing is often times. These girls were happy and well-adjusted in elementary school. Also by far the most common complaint was that they hated their mothers and this was very surprising because my experience of their mothers was their mothers were desperately fighting to save their wholeness and authenticity. I'm not a parent blamer myself. My experience is that most parents are trying very hard to help their adolescents to a very difficult stage also of the problems are not just in therapy offices. My daughter was going to Junior High when I wrote this book and I knew many of her friends whenever I go to schools. I'm approached by girls who come up to me and say I've never told anyone this before, but I have an eating disorder orI was sexually assaulted or I'm pregnant and so on and so just listening to the voices of those girls. I started really asking why are girls in so much pain today why I have so many been traumatized and what can I do to be helpful to these girls? And those are really the questions that led me to write Reviving Ophelia. When I first thought about girls, I was relying on my own experience as an adolescent to understand and I rapidly realized that I was totally lost when I did that and so I want to begin today by telling you a little bit about my Adolescence in Beaver City, Nebraska in the late 50s to give you a sense for how much the world has changed for adolescent girls. I grew up in a small town that was built around a square that had old man in the Town Square sitting under Elm trees that handed out Licorice and pennies to children when they walked back and forth across the square and when I go back to my small town today and going to the stores with my children, they're shocked at how people are you don't just go in and buy a box of Kleenex. You have a conversation with the clerk and she asks after my six Young. Brothers and sisters and I asked after her children and it takes half an hour to catch up on all the mutual relationships we have before I can leave the store and move on. We had lots of relatives who came to visit when I was a child and they stayed a long time. I had cousins who came and stayed all summer. I had grandparents who lived with me some of the time while I was growing up and if that's my happiest memory as a child is the sound of grown-ups laughing in the the next room while they played cards when I fell asleep at night. I love that sound we did not have the word media television was one snowy Channel a few hours a day. The movie theater was owned by a man who showed one movie every two weeks a movie. He carefully previewed to make sure it was suitable for families. The scariest movie he ever showed was the blob. Mostly it was biblical Extravaganza switch all seem to Star Charlton Heston Disney movies Doris Day movies or Debbie Reynolds films. My favorite all-time movie was Tammy. I wanted her name and I wanted her face. I thought Tammy was beautiful music was very Bland the 45s. We bought we're by Bobby Vinton Frankie Avalon and the Everly Brothers. My parents wouldn't let me buy Bobby Darin's record multiplication because it was too suggestive. Sexually. They also wouldn't let me watch Gunsmoke because it was too violent. There were no drugs in my town. There was no point ography that I knew of and there was no alcohol sold in my town. There were eight churches and no bars. We had blue laws which meant that the stores are all closed at 6 at night and on Sundays and in fact, the serious adult topic of conversation was whether or not it was a sin to mow your yard on Sunday. That was something adults talked about also in my town children were safe out of doors at all hours. I played with my friends in fields around town along the stream at the fairground behind the school. I stayed in the city park late into the night telling my friends ghost stories and we could scare the heck out of each other with ghost stories, but when we separated and walked our separate ways home, we were not afraid of people that the doors were not locked at our house. We didn't have locks on our doors. My mother was a doctor and she never worried about the medications in her medical bag. We left the ignition. The key is in the ignition of our cars and the only crime I ever remember adults hearing hearing adult discuss was bike theft. That was the crime in our town. In fact, I remember when I first realized children could die. There was a school that burned down in Chicago and I think of 60 children were killed and I remember being really stunned by that story. But actually in the late 50s Charles Starkweather right across our state and he absolutely stunned us before Starkweather. We didn't have the term mass murder and there were many other terms that we're not in the language such as stalker herpes drive by shooting hiv-positive and so on. Coming of age is much harder for children. Now the national Center for Health statistics in 1988 reported that there's been a 300% increase in adolescent suicide in the last decade life is harder for all Americans and there's been a 17% increase in suicide across all age groups, but adolescents are specifically stressed population within those larger statistics and I think there's many reasons. Why life is tougher. One of the reasons is all over America Villages have disappeared. We've had an enormous demographic shifts and world what Kingsley Davis called primary relationships where everyone knew everyone else and their dog has been replaced by a world of secondary relationships are children move among strangers. He gets rich in a small town because everybody's watching this a good line when I was a girl. Everybody was watching one time. I stole some lilacs from an old lady's wish she was so mad at me. She knew my name. She came out and lectured me. She told me my parents have done a poor job raising me. She called my parents told them they done it for a job raising you when I got home I was in big trouble now, I think personally the old lady was cranky and overreacted but I never stole anything again in my life in contrast to that. I was on talk radio not too many months ago a man called in to say that some high school kids were vandalizing his home. He lived right by school. He gone out to talk to these children about it and they had sworn at him the next day. He went out and they threatened to burn down his house. He hated children when he was on the radio and the sad thing about that story is this he did not know those children's name. He could not call their parents. He was afraid of them and was left very bitter. He will not vote for a school bond issue or work for those children's well-being in the future the children on the other hand did not learn that it's wrong to vandalize. They were not held accountable and we're not taught a lesson that they desperately needed to learn. I think this is related to the business of villages disappearing and people not knowing each other's children anymore. I had an experience driving along the highway and Lincoln a little for 5 year old girl was crossing a busy street in the rain and I thought about what should I do? She was far too young to be in that precarious spot. I thought about stopping and then I thought you know if I stop I may scare and she may run into the street because she's Afraid of me then I thought or she might report me for trying to a kidnapper or something clinical psychologist arrested for sexually harassing a child. I can see the headline. So I'm sort of debating this as I go down the road thinking what's the right thing to do here and another car stopped and I thought it was thank goodness. Somebody is going to help that little girl and a man got out and I thought oh, no, maybe he's going to kidnap her. It's a very complicated world. We live in in terms of adults no longer knowing children children having fear in their eyes when adults that they don't know approach them and so on. We live now not in villages, but in an electronic community children are growing up and what Greg Brown calls one big town and it's connected by media media plays an enormous role in the lives of children as Bill Moyers put it recently on PBS. Our children are being raised by appliances adolescents. No, Madonna Beavis and Butt-head better than they know their neighbors or cousins television video games movies and music are children's teachers and storytellers and often. They teach Jenks values. They teach just do it. If it feels good. It is good. Ralph Nader says that the media teaches addictions violence and low-grade sexuality and he's absolutely right and most importantly the stories children are told are about raising profits not raising children, and this is a tragedy For all children children have a more fragmented family life. I won't give you the statistics on single parent families. Do you know those I just want to say something about extended family, which is a wonderful resource. That's lost too many children today. I had a boy in therapy for shoplifting and this boy was basically a good boy. He lived with his mother who worked long hours got home around 6, he came in because he got in a little trouble after school and then the police and picked him up and referred him to me and I said talk to this boy. I thought to myself there is nothing wrong with this boy that a grandfather couldn't cure but his grandfather live 2000 miles away and it's seen him twice in his lifetime. So I think our children are very deprived of an incredibly valuable resource often times. There's more alcohol and more drugs. There's more addicted people and most important from the stands. Young adolescents age of decision-making about chemicals has gone from Early College 18 or 19 to 6th and 7th grade when children are very very young and there's more guns and there's more danger the children's defense Fund in 1994 said 50,000 children have been killed by guns in the last 15 years. That's more people than were killed in Vietnam a 1993 Harris poll of children grade 6 through 12 found that more than a third of all children believe they will die before they are aged 21. It's impossible to overestimate the fear that children have Robert Coles. The psychiatrist said that children in America are more traumatized than children in Lebanon in 1990. So it's a very difficult time when I was most aware of this was when my daughter graduated from high school. She said, You know, I really feel badly for the children who aren't graduating with me. And I said, who are you talkin about? And she said the children who've died and she listed off a dozen children. She knew who had been killed by their parents who had killed themselves who have been killed in a drunk driving accident murdered working at a quick stop and so on when I graduated from high school on YouTube young people who have died both have cancer. So it's a very difficult and more traumatic world for children adolescents is always been difficult a friend of mine is Scottish psychologist said the best way to understand teenagers is to think of them as constantly on LSD and that's a good rule of thumb teenagers are very emotional very intense wide swings in terms of their thinking 1 time adolescence was age 13 to 18 now. It is from eight or nine to age 25. It takes a very long time to move through this stage and I want to talk a little bit about what I see is some of the reasons for that in America. We've always placed a tremendous premium on Independence. There's a James Dean line from a movie he's asked what are you rebelling against and he says what have you got that's a very American attitude toward Independence. We encourage in a hundred ways teenagers to differentiate from their parents as a way to become a adult a story recently. I heard a story from a friend of mine. She and her husband had taken their two sons teenage boys to the state fair to hear the crash test dummies in Lincoln and after the fair that it's a Saturday night. They're walking down the Midway and their oldest boy Anders 14 See some of his friends and pulls away from the family. Will the parents were hurt by this. It's a very very loving close family, but they didn't say too much about it. The mother said she felt really like a gig but when they got in the car, they were kind of teasing Anders about this and he burst into tears and he said, you know, Mom and Dad I really love you and I have a lot of fun with you and I like to go places with you, but I'm a teenager now and my friends won't understand that so I think for the next few years we better not go out on Saturdays anymore. This is a very sad thing when you think about it now children have always distance from their parents in this country is part of the long-term American ethic the problem is now the ways they distance can get them killed. When 30 years ago kids distance with DuckTales and by using the f word now, they distance in ways that are much more self-destructive than that in contrast. And when I really started thinking about this, I interviewed Vietnamese girls for my book. I was talking to an Asian girl and I said, how often do you argue with your mother? She looked at me kind of strange land I said, do you argue with your mother? She said, why would I argue with my mother? She gave me the gift of Life The Very unamerican answer to that question. In America today adolescence is scripted in a way that causes a normous tension between children and parents are definitions of adulthood as seen by teenagers are dead wrong adult two teenagers means rebellious self-destructive behavior. That means smoking drinking using drugs and being sexually active furthermore the messages of mass culture pit teenagers against their parents and their own good sense, you know, there's many an adequate parents out there and that's where all inadequate parents-to-be on but even the worst parents are not trying to make money off their children and when children turn away from their parents and turn toward the mass culture. They're turning toward a culture that selling them products that has one goal, which is to make money so that we're now seeing terrible things happen to teenagers for example in New York City when I was There last month. I read an article in the paper that children are caring razor blades to the schools and slashing each other for designer clothes a very sad thing just at a time when teenagers most need adult help they turn away from their parents and their toward their peers and mass culture for validation. It's a very segregated culture is the poisonous culture adolescence is his formative is early childhood, but parents are less than control demand socializing agent is peers and the media Nine Inch Nails Madonna have more power than parents with the average 13-year old what I say in the book is adolescence thinking is mature immature and 7th graders are not ready for the decisions. They face girls who sleep with their stuff unicorns are not ready for sexual harassment and offers of LSD. The learning curve is to seep and become symptomatic I want to talk a little bit specifically about girls. When I first wrote this book. I thought about the pre adolescent girls. I've had in therapy the elementary school girls and I realized I'd almost see no girls in therapy that even when they were very traumatized they were in and out of therapy and in the matter of a couple months and that I'd seen fewer than a dozen girls in all my years is a therapist to wear age 6 to 10 safe. I also thought about girls. I know for example my daughter when she was 10 Hugo the whale got stranded in San Francisco babe and Sarah was convinced if we flew her to San Francisco Bay, she could talk you go out to see this great typical of girls this age. They're very zesty. They're very resilient very emotionally sturdy. One of Sarah's friends a girl named Andrea wrote a novel her fifth grade year over the summer the history of Billy the Kid which was Really horrible, but it was 380 pages long and she worked out at all summer long. So what happens is Girls fall apart with Junior High they crossed some sort of barrier. And as I say in the book as plans and ships go down in the Bermuda Triangle the cells of many girls go down and disappear in the Bermuda Triangle of adolescents. Now, this is an old story. That isn't anything new standall wrote All Geniuses born women are lost to the public Good Deed Arroyo road to a young friend self evoland you all die at 15 in the 1940s Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex wrote about early adolescence as a time when girls go from being to seeming when they sacrifice their holness on the altar of social acceptance. So these ideas are not new Gloria Steinem in the sixties talked about early adolescence as when girls get their training to be female impersonators. so it's if the time that has been examined before I think what I say though is something different which is it's in the 90s even more difficult for girls and I want to say something about that because one of the most puzzling aspects of the problems with adolescent girls for me is why are they having more trouble now, for example, when I was in high school, I took that High School interest test and scored highest on Forest ranger girls were not permitted to work for the Park Service. Then my counselor just said forget it. You can't be a forest ranger. I got it together. I was very romantic about Oxford University with all that Ivy and so on and I got it together to ride Oxford and inquire how to become a Rhodes scholar and I got a letter back saying young women are not allowed in the road scholar program. Since my high school days women can be Park Rangers women are Rhode Scholars. We've had an equal rights movement. We've had affirmative action. So why are girls having more trouble now? Here's the way I put it together that from the point of view of a woman like myself who is 47 years old. He was fortunate enough to be middle-class well-educated and so on the world is great and I'm having all sorts of opportunities that women have not had in the history of the world, but my world is not the world of a 7th grade girl. The world of a 7th grade girl is very different. It's the halls of a junior high. It's Freddy Krueger, it's Terminator, it's MTV. It's Snoop Doggy Dogg getting sexually teased at a roller rink Etc. And it's really important to understand that world to understand what's happening with girls today. They've always crashed into Western Civilization, but now they crash into a media-saturated corporate civilization that markets them jeans alcohol and nicotine and it's an even more simplistic and degraded culture than the culture that I came of age in so I think it's very important as parents as Educators to do some moving around in that Universe in order to understand the reality of girls today. I want to say a few things about the media. The APA shows that women on television are represented in very stereotyped ways. The model woman on TV is young beautiful dependent passive and valued for her appearance unattractive women minority women old women and confident women are under-represented. Sometimes women are presented as victims. For example Sports Illustrated had six covers with women last year one was the swimsuit edition. The other five women pictured were victims Mary. Pierce beat by her father Nancy Kerrigan kneecapped Monica seles knife to tennis and the to Cleveland Indian widows. Those are the women featured. Our media has affected adolescents tremendously one third of all 8th graders are sexually active at this point in time in our culture. And as you know, there's a great deal of violence. I'd like to talk more about this and I will hopefully during the question-and-answer. I'd also like to talk about the role of parents, but I'm running out of time and I want to talk 5 minutes about what I think is the most important part of the speech and that is the kosher. My grandfather had a saying that he told a story about a city where people were falling off a cliff and basically the city Elders got together to discuss whether to have a fence at the top of the cliff or an ambulance down in the valley and the work I do as a therapist is ambulance down in the valley where I pick up the victims of lethal cultural policies and I got very very tired of that and I wanted to write a book that encouraged all of us to look at the issues in our girl poisoning culture Play-Doh said that education is teaching children to find pleasure in the right things. And I think one of the problems we have right now is as a culture, we are teaching children to find pleasure in all the wrong things. It's bad for their mental health is bad for the harmony of Fame. And ultimately our democracy will not survive the lessons. We are teaching children. I think that is very important for all of us to accept the fact that the media is hurting our children and that many other things in this culture are hurting our children and that we as an adult's have a responsibility to protect children, you know, there's a wonderful play by Arthur Miller called All My Sons and it's the story of a man in in World War II who makes airplane parts and is the warm speeds up he falls behind so he starts making defective Parts one of his sons a pilot and when he realizes that Pilots are dying because of the parts his father makes he kills himself and the play ends up being about the family's efforts to come to grips with that. There's a lovely scene at the end of that where he says the father is talking to his room. Sonny said, you know I just did this for you son and for your for your mother, but now I realize that they were all my sons and I think that's where I'm Erica needs to be again all the children in our culture need to be all our sons and daughters. We need to have a new value system in this country that makes it wrong to make money in ways that hurt children. I wrote the book in the hope of inspiring a cultural dialogue about what the needs of our children wear in this country and how we adults who care about children could work together to make a kosher that is girl nourishing a kosher where our daughter's can once again walk the streets safe and growing up feeling whole and free. Thank you very much. Thank you. I would be most happy to take questions from anyone in the room. My name is Paco her and I'm a senior from cretin-derham Hall High School. And I was wondering as as a member of a group of teenage girls that I think are fairly strong and turn the leadership skills what we can do for other girls who who may have leadership skills, but are afraid to show them In & Out board fence. How can we help them cultivate that without seeming intimidating or hottie and any sense. Are you in highschool? Did you say what one of the best experiences I've had since writing. This book is traveling around and speaking to lots of high schools and lots of girls in high schools and I encountered in Topeka High School a club started by young women called fearless and it was a club designed to empower the girls at the school and it did a lot of discussing media discussing MTV talking about movies and advertising it helped consciousness-raising with the school talked about sexual. Harassment policies at the school. They had a self-defense class for girls and their mothers and so I would encourage you to think about organizing at the school a club for girls so that they can get together and talk about these issues. Another thing that I really recommend is that teenagers do volunteer work my daughter when she was in junior high and I worked at a homeless shelter and it had four very good importance of sex on her one was it got her away from purely pure culture and with people of all ages and so that was very important to it got her with people whose alcohol and drug use did not look romantic. Three homeless people are among the only people in America who have plenty of time and she loved playing dominoes putting jigsaw puzzles together listening to old man who grew up on ranches talk about their experiences as children and finally and this is the most important thing. I think young people are very idealistic and if they don't have ways to work to make the world a better place, they grow cynical and despairing and depressed. I think work is the best antidote to Despair and I think my daughter would have become a sort of cynical jaded person if she hadn't had that concrete experience of getting out of making a difference to people so I would encourage you to think about making a difference not only in your school, but moving out into your community and working there, too. Yes, good afternoon. Thank you very much money was Chris Fournier on Preston of Greater Minneapolis Girl Scout council thinking about the many organizations whose mission is indeed to be in support of girls to ensure that they grow up healthy in the self-sufficient women what general suggestions might you have for all of us so that we can continue to be the fence at the top of the cliff rather than ambulance Chasers. Thank you. Yes, will you know we could talk about that all afternoon and I could answer that question in so many ways because I think about this a lot, but let me just I want to say one thing about it and then we'll move on. That is my experience of the last few months has been I'm going all over the country and everywhere I go I hear these marvelous stories about people working to make things better for girls. I hear back poetry readings for girls at bookstores or there's another lovely program coming out of Yellow Springs, Ohio. That's an environmental mentorship program where young teenagers are paired with old people who've lived in the community who showed them around the community and so on The Fearless Club I mention there's lovely projects all over the country, but most people don't know about those and it's almost like Community by Community everyone's Reinventing the wheel. So one of the things I would recommend to those of you in this room is gather together have some kind of a clearing house so you can help each other share the wisdom you have coordinated and so on I spoke to the young women's advocacy. Project in Topeka, and they had a very good idea which was at the end of my speech. They said everybody in the room who wants to work to help adolescents in this community sign up here. We're going to have a meeting a week in the same spot and get to work and I think it is very important to have people work very hard together on a community level and also to have some some contact with national people who can share their good ideas with you. So doctor pay for my name is Anne Peterson. I have a question as a mother of two pre-adolescent girls and in light of the statistic that you shared with us about how your former patients hate their mother. How do I go about turning off the TV taking away? The RL Stine murder books taking away the idea that they might by designer jeans that they will wear midriff showing blouses to school and encouraging them to see other strong women is Role Models without having them turn in to the kind of patient that you see hating their mother at the end of all this thoughts about that one of the reasons. I wrote the book choose cannot be tackled one family at a time. The sickness is in the kosher and if one family tries to alone handle all these problems, they're overwhelmed. So I think you can only do partially what needs to be done. Otherwise, you know, what there's a a metaphor going first class on the Titanic and that's almost what it feels like people will try So hard to be first-class themselves, but the ship is going down. So I want to give you those some specific thoughts about what you can do as a parent because I know parents are very desperate right now. One of the problems is the role of parents has totally changed since I was a girl when I was a girl the primary role of parents was to introduce their adolescents to the broader culture. Now, the primary role of parents is to protect their adolescents from the broader culture. We're all off-script. None of us know how to do that for sure. And we all are generally ineffective when we try there's two general ways that parents try to do this one is by processing the media. That's a good idea. Although it can be overdone. I remember with my kids. I'd go into process the Miss America contest with him and they go mom get out of here. We know what you think of the Miss America contest, you know, you're at a little bit of a disadvantage you can over process very easily on the other hand. The other way is censorship and that has its limits to because your children one of the things people that argue with my position say as well if you don't like the media don't watch it and don't let your kids watch it. It's much more complicated than that your children go to school with children who have been brutalized by 8 hours a day of Television those children have different manners different attitudes toward women and so on because of that and your children have to cope with a world and which the average child watches a 8 hours a day of TV. So that's impossible to avoid or ignore. I think there are things you can do. I mean one thing I think it's very important to do is obviously turn off your TV set have very limited amount of time children can view I think it's a good idea not to have most of the magazines that girls read in your home when my daughter was in junior high. She got sick and I went to the drugstore to get her some antibiotics and I thought well, she's probably not going to want to read Dostoevsky this week. I'll buy her some like 17 or Mademoiselle or something like that. I picked up those magazines they were horrible and I couldn't you have in this state the best magazine for girls in the country new moon and I've been like spreading it sprays all over but you can do some things to control. The other thing is I think it's very important to not just tell if children don't watch TV. I think it's supposed to say instead of watching TV. Here's what we're going to do and offer them a check. To learn about the natural world offer them a chance to be altruistic and so on on the other hand one of the ironies one of the real problems we have is a culture is the best parent and children in this country. Watch the least TV and vice-versa the neediest children the most vulnerable children watch the most TV and because of that all of us have an obligation to make TV the best babysitter that we can because the reality is it is going to be babysitting children all over this country and what that means is we must find PBS we must do something to get the programming that children watch particularly between 3 in the afternoon and 6 at night decent and responsible. The Power Rangers should not be on the air. They've caused deaths in Europe and they were taken off the air and we as a country must do something to teach our children what they need to learn to grow up. happy healthy people Yes, my name is Melissa Summers and I'm a professional working with parents with mental illness. And my question is many of these parents have adolescent daughters. And I've I've seen these children who have been pretty isolation reared and feet and who have no support network and really no parental role model because their parents have a serious mental illness and what I'm wondering is what's we as professionals can offer to these girls who really have not learned what it's have not had a parental role model of any kind. well, of course, that's a terribly complicated question, but I will say something about it, which is Children are getting so little help anymore from adults beside their parents that if they have parents who are mentally ill or or disabled because of alcohol or something. They're very very vulnerable. You know, that's kind of tried saying it takes a village to raise a child what that really means to me is that many adults are involved in the lives of children and increasingly that's not the case. And so one of the things I recommend is whenever you can get every adult that the child knows involved in other words get aunts and uncles any extended family grandparents. I'm starting to do my motto now as a therapist when I have an adolescent who's not responding to therapy is have the parents and the family in and then if she still not responding have all the answers and uncles and their grandparents in and just keep adding people until we outnumber her and I think it's very important. To get next door neighbor's to get school teachers as many adults as possible on the team taking care of the girl. The other thing I'm realizing many children are learning their lessons about how to behave from television. They do not know how to behave so just as an example, one of the things I've started doing the last year which embarrasses the heck out of my children is when I see children behaving improperly in public I go up to them and I very gently say, I wonder if anyone's ever told you that you shouldn't use the F-word in public and I do that not because I'm some sort of moralistic prude who feels like fainting when I hear the f word I do that because I'm seriously concerned that many children in this country are not getting lessons in decent respectful Behavior politeness is not in our culture right now. There are many rude people. There are rude politicians. There are rude people on TV. And our children are learning rudeness and I think those of us who remained polite have an obligation to help children learn the rules for proper decent civilized Behavior. Yes, my name is Judy Johnson, and I'm the principal at a high energy school with 1600 7th and 8th graders. And I'm wondering what you see as the role of Education in some of the issues that you have raised today. Well Judy, I I congratulate you on your energy. You know, I've been speaking a lot of schools and it's humbling for me because I'm not an educator. So I'm not someone who's you know, terribly expert at schools, but I will tell you the two things. I generally say when I talk to Educators about schools one is I think what's going on whether you call it a junior high or middle school. I don't think that matters so much as I think what matters at two things one is children this age need counseling the under enormous amount of stress. They have incredibly difficult life decisions to make about everything from their sexuality into their alcohol use and so on and at least at the school my daughter went to the ra 5 counselors for 3000 children children need teachers who know them. Well who know their names who know whether their parents are getting divorced or not and they need counselors. They can go talk to you when they find out their best friend's pregnant. So that counseling component is incredibly powerful. The other thing is Are schools are absolutely chaos right now in terms of sexual behavior children get two kinds of sex education in this country one from adults who care about them and those adults whether they're fundamentalists are unitarians can to say the same thing which is when you're in seventh grade don't have sex wait until you're older wait until you can handle the responsibility of the sexual behavior and so on the other message children yet they get from their media and TV and so on and that message could not be worse if we tried to make it worse. If you've taken kids to movies, you have noticed that people have sex before they have conversations in the movies and this is a horrible thing to do to children. They are very confused about sex and Lincoln we have what's called cotillion classes ballroom dancing classes. Which are wildly popular in spite of the fact, I don't think you can go ballroom dancing for 2,000 miles from our town. So I'm wondering what is it about these cotillion classes anyway, and I think what it is. Is there one of the few places where children are getting guidelines on proper behavior with the opposite sex. Our children are hungry for good decent consistent rules. And I think schools can play an enormous role in that partly in having forms with parents about developing and supporting those rules Community by Community partly by encouraging parents to have turn off the TV day and so on partly by having teachers and counselors in the school's help children process their relationships, you know, 7th graders, everything is peers to them. They are about Piers friend's social life. It's when there's an enormous pressure to be masculine and feminine. And it's very interesting in therapy parents will come in and agonize over whether the husband and wife were doing an equal amount of the dishes at ignore the fact that their daughters listening to Madonna and MTV 8 hours today. The daughter is learning gender roles from Madonna not from her mother and father primarily by time. She's in 7th grade and the schools I think can be counterculture and they can teach resistance training and they can help parents. Wake up to the very serious issues that children face schools tend to be scapegoated in this country. What happens is people get angry. If a teacher says something sexist and so on and they should they should get angry. I don't say there's anything wrong with that on the other hand the same teacher or the same parent that is very upset. If a teacher Miss speaks will have children who are watching Freddy Krueger movies on Friday nights, and that's not right and teachers. I think can help parents become much more aware and send. Today to the issues of where their children are actually being educated. So that's what I would recommend to you. Hello, thank you for being here. My name Danity hornbacher. I'm also an administrator at a junior high and I'm sitting with the table of counselor psychologist and teachers of the students that you're talking about. So we are all ears in our efforts to do some of the things that you're talking about. One of the things that we have observed is the tremendous resistance of the mothers of the girls who are in The Straits that you are describing at you have found in your practice. It's quite as quite astonishing and we are somewhat at a loss to know how to deal with it. I was wondering if you have had that experience in your travels are in your practice. Well, not exactly to be honest, but let me let me speculate in spite of the fact. I'm totally ignorant of the problem. One of the problems mothers have in this culture. Is there help emotionally responsible for the needs of everyone in their family and when things go wrong mothers are black and psychologists have contributed to that. We have been a mother bashing profession when women in the 50s and 60s took their autistic children and a psychologist psychologist diagnose them refrigerator mothers and blame them for their children's genetic autism. So we have a very scurrilous past as a field and I think beyond that it's a culture that in general holes women accountable for pain and that has of course implications for everything from domestic violence to how mothers feel when their teenage daughters get in trouble. One of the things I try to do when I work with mothers is say to them that they are not totally responsible. The behavior their adolescents, you know Clinton said in his inaugural address governments don't raise children parents raise children. I don't think he's right. I think by adolescents the culture is raising children, and it's very important to help parents see that they are not totally responsible for my mother who said my daughter has an eating disorder and her therapist told me that it was probably because of the way I deal with food in the home. Well, the mother may have some idiosyncratic way of dealing with food that exacerbates the problem on the other hand. All you have to do is open up a J crew catalog or turn on the television to have some thoughts about why this girl might have an eating disorder. Yes, hi. I'm a mom of three teenage daughters and in listening to you speak today. I'm wondering if there are things you could tell me and tell society that we could say to our girls. That would give them some hope as they move into this difficult culture that they face. You know one of the really good experiences I've had his all over the country. People are working hard to make things better for children. And it's unfortunate that the stories Americans are hearing r r really pessimism, you know, the OJ Simpson story The Susan Smith story The Newt Gingrich story their stories of pessimism stories of pessimism, I think I think it's very important for girls to hear stories of Hope to hear stories that they can make a difference by their actions. I think it's important to train girls to look at the media and the culture around them with the eyes of an anthropologist and to think about how does this particular movie affect my view of myself? What values does it teach me? What am I learning about sex when I listen to certain radio stations and so on. I think those things are important, you know, it's very interesting. It's a very high-tech culture but girls have very low-tech needs. They need to be loved and valued for who they are. They need to be respected for their talents and interests not for their sexuality and popularity. They need to work. They need psychological safety. They need physical safety. I don't give how to advise. Parents, but in my book, I really try to write about the fact that while the world's changed a great deal. The needs of girls haven't changed and I think the clue as a parent is to think about what those deep needs are and then to help your daughter devise ways to meet those very true and legitimate need she has best of luck to you.